University of California San Francisco

Give to UCSF
Advanced
315 Results in the UCSF News Center
Type of Article
Areas of Focus
Date of Publication
Health And Science Topics
Campus Topics

Psilocybin Rewires the Brain for People with Depression

Scientists at UC San Francisco and Imperial College London found that psilocybin fosters greater connections between different regions of the brain in depressed people, freeing them up from long-held patterns of rumination and excessive self-focus.

A graphic rendering of a brain’s landscape that measures connections between areas of the brain that affect thought patterns. In this rendering of a brain with depression, high peaks are in yellow, with deeper spaces in purple.

Looking to the Cell’s Power Generators for Clues to Depression

Hoping to discover a new approach to treating depression, UCSF researchers looked at mitochondrial proteins and found that people with untreated depression have significantly lower levels of these proteins. New hypotheses emerge about the relationship between depression and the function of the brain’s energy-hungry neurons.

Microscopic image of fibroblast cells from mouse. Nucleus is in blue and mitochondria is in green